FRANKFURT.- Starting today, November 11, 2015, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents the Dutch artist Constant Dullaart’s online performance “The Possibility of an Army.” The performance, which has been developed for the Schirn, will take place in the social network Facebook. It will be documented on the Schirn website: www.schirn.de/the-possibility-of-an-army/.

Dullaart’s work “The Possibility of an Army” critically explores the concept of digital identity which has strongly gained in importance through the daily use of social networks. The starting-point of Dullaart’s performance is the fact that interaction in the social media is based on the communication between virtual identities and that online networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest offer each user the possibility to establish an ideal character and furnish it with the desired attributes. Social differences are leveled by means of skillful camouflage, social hierarchies breached with strategies optimizing the virtual self. Playing with one’s self, however, has long since ceased to be just an issue of social integration and personal success stories: the image of an individual’s personality on the Internet has come to occupy center stage for economic interests. On the one hand, the companies behind the social networks have installed the large-scale selling of customer and user data collected online as a business model. On the other, their services are up for sale themselves, as it were, through third-party firms, so-called click farms. Digital identities have become the currency of multinational enterprises, and the like button has established itself as a cornerstone of a new economy of attention that has also taken hold of the art world. Next to profiles of real persons we find countless artificially concocted identities which their authors and buyers use to increase popularities, spread opinions, and shift moods. The existence of these fictitious profiles questions the principle of quantifying social interactions, which is misread as a measure for cultural values. In “The Possibility of an Army,” Dullaart sets out with an army of virtual mercenaries from history to search for weak points in a system that has been established for quite some time.

Max Hollein, Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, on the online performance: “Constant Dullaart’s work for the Schirn exposes the mechanisms running counter to the once utopian idea of the Internet as a free and democratic sphere. The artist raises the crucial question: which cultural values should today’s society adhere to? He holds a mirror up to us – and always does so with caustic irony: a feature that also characterizes other artists of his generation, the so-called ‘post-modernists of the Internet.’”

In his text “Declaration” recently published on the Schirn magazine (www.schirn-mag.com), Dullaart has initiated a critical discussion by addressing a number of issues: “How do we end the unbridled use of this false validation system in journalism? How can we make clear that follower counts, views or likes are not and will never be a trustworthy measure of social commitment as long as financial incentive is in place to manipulate these counts? Even that quantified social feedback does not mean quality? How do we keep this objectivist system celebrating efficiency and a corporate, western approach to art and culture from manipulating cultural critique? Do we need to sell T-shirts and tote bags on Kick-starter before we can criticize these false validation systems?”

The Schirn magazine will focus on the subject of identity for the entire duration of the online performance and publish texts by Byung Cul-Han, Robert Sakrowski, the artist, and others.

Constant Dullaart (b. in Leiderdorp in the Netherlands in 1979), who explores the influence of novel digital technologies on everyday life, emotions, and people’s coexistence with each other as well as the possibilities of virtual self-presentation in his projects, lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam. His practice as an artist comprises websites, installations, pictorial manipulations, and performances in the form of interventions, which he presents both offline and in the public realm of the Internet. His performances critically deal with technological developments and their impact on both society and the individual. Dullaart’s works have been presented in solo and group shows at a number of venues such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2009), the Autocenter in Berlin (2011), the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow (2012), the Future Gallery in Berlin (2013), and the Futura Gallery in Prague (2015).